Psychology as a scientific field enjoys a tremendous level of popularity throughout society, a fascination that could even be described as religious. This is likely the reason why it is one of the most popular undergraduate majors in European and American universities. At the same time, it is not uncommon to encounter the firm opinion that psychology in no way qualifies for consideration as a science. Such extremely critical opinions about psychology are often borrowed from authorities – after all, it was none other than the renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman who, in a famous interview in 1974, compared the social sciences and psychology in particular to a cargo cult. Scepticism toward psychological science can also arise following encounters with the commonplace simplifications and myths spread by pop-psychology, or as a product of a failure to understand what science is and how it solves its dilemmas.

According to William O’Donohue and Brendan Willis of the University of Nevada, these issues are further compounded by undergraduate psychology textbooks. Writing recently in Archives of Scientific Psychology, they argue that “[a] lack of clarity and accuracy in [psych textbooks] in describing what science is and psychology’s relationship to science are at the heart of these issues.” The authors based their conclusions on a review of 30 US and UK undergraduate psychology textbooks, most updated in the last few years (general texts and others covering abnormal, social and cognitive psych), in which they looked for 18 key contemporary issues in philosophy of science.

Almost a quarter of the sampled textbooks explicitly and boastfully stated that there is no difference between psychology and other “hard” sciences such as chemistry and physics. Yet only one textbook discussed “methodological freedom” – the idea asserted by the philosopher-critic of science, Paul Feyerabend, that all scientific techniques are different. Only one textbook mentioned the issue of improper use of ad hoc hypotheses, a characteristic of pseudoscience. Similarly, there was only one reference to the ideas put forward by Feyerabend and Alan Gross that persuasion and rhetoric are a key part of science – i.e. that the scientific endeavour is not merely about “the dispassionate evaluation of evidence”.

There were also just three mentions of such important issues as “evolutionary epistemology” (how knowledge accumulates), “social constructionism” (how social context shapes our scientific understanding), and “Kuhnian paradigms” (a discussion regarding Kuhn’s idea of paradigms, including that knowledge is only interpreted within a certain paradigm and how Kuhnian paradigm shifts occur), and the question of whether psychology is a pre-paradigmatic science or mature science. Only four textbooks contained any sort of discussion regarding whether or not the definition of science itself is a controversial topic. The roles of competing theories and evaluations in science were mentioned only six times.

“… [U]ndergraduate psychology students are not being provided a clear sense of what science is as well as its complexities,” the researchers concluded. “[The] data also generally suggest that students are being presented a simplistic notion of science as having a relatively straightforward and settled characterisation. Few texts mention that science is difficult to define, or that there are multiple proposed accounts of science. This is concerning, especially given the continual debate regarding psychology’s (and other social sciences) relationships to the natural sciences …” O’Donohue and Willis said.

On the plus side, there was a far more exhaustive treatment by textbook authors of some meta-science issues (the question of how science should be practised). Most frequently – in 16 textbooks – there was discussion of the crucial role of theory in forming and testing hypotheses. Among other topics that O’Donohue and Willis looked for, those mentioned most frequently included the tentativeness of scientific facts and whether science is deductive or inductive (seven books argued for it being deductive, three against). However, only eight of the sampled books identified pseudoscience as a concern and discussed how to differentiate pseudoscience from legitimate science.

A simplistic notion of science presented in undergrad textbooks is not only a problem for the image of our discipline in the eyes of the public. O’Donohue and Willis rightly point out that covering issues such as “logic, definition of knowledge, bias in science, how to evaluate theories and other topics that can apply to the informed citizen’s appraisal of important issues ranging from human contributions to climate change, to the legitimacy of research involving Big Pharma, to understanding whether evolution is ‘just a theory’,” are also relevant for the general goals of a liberal education.

Unfortunately, the content of textbooks in undergraduate psychology suggest that they serve not only to instruct, but also to essentially indoctrinate students into a particular way of thinking. A pity that this new study and others have so far not answered the question of how much content has been omitted by authors because they disagree with it, and how much because they are ignorant of it. Perhaps this is a significant research problem that should be explored in the future?

8 thoughts on “Many undergrad psych textbooks do a poor job of describing science and exploring psychology’s place in it”

Yes, they’re text books. They jam limited-info summaries into one book. It’s up to the student to read and understand countless other more detailed AND conflicting texts of the entries from their textbooks and also anything they discover was left out or NEW, forevermore until they expire.
Learning should never end, there is no ceiling on ever-changing data, it’s a constant in and out stream like the breaths we breathe. When individuals stop learning, they might as well stop breathing. Dunning-Kruger syndrome flourishes in stagnant minds who’ve reached their apex.

The image is very interesting somebody reading psychology book and very happy…psychology from ancient time, people wanted to know what other was thinking, then wanted to control…it is a quest of human kind, then wanted to know, what themselves were thinking… Magicians, artists, priests and politicians, further selling marketing people were or are most users of practical psychology. Even, we have koodu vitu koodu palatial, that is getting into others shoes, reading in a context…

Many psychologists are atheists and philosophers, although I am neither, not to be a psychologist.

Having taken mind- body combine as my casual informal research quest into nature, definitely psychology is more of science of understanding ourselves, artiscal if one wishes. Desire is not only root cause of sorrow, but base for our dreams and our humanity, and, intuitively underlying the universal unified field force.

The two text books, I bought one authored by professors from Harvard another Stanford. They just look alike with subtle differences. As usual had only read few pages..

Going back to Einstein – Tagore conversation and Tagore insisting that all scientific findings will have to be interpreted using our mind, the science of mind plays vital, so only we have studies on human brain, and naturally transferring into Artificial Intelligence.

I might now abstract study of mind, the science of it is psychology. How we do it in textbooks, of course I am not an expert, but considering the professionals tendency to experiment on their subjects or testing, indicate the effectiveness or outcome, the competence to evaluate and relate. Our quest, the Indian ancient tradition, on mastering or controlling our own mind, though can be called yoga, is a practice, but now, it could be both art and science….

It is a lot worse than presented here. A large portion of the factual science based Psychology was weaponized by social media, and the marketing industry, and is used to mislead and propagandize, especially in the US. The industry worked hand in hand with industry interests to redefine and reframe everything from torture to data extraction through intrusive means. Plenty of well paid psychologists are presented by mass media as “Experts’ to redefine the nature of reality. In the US for a price they will justify any kind of cruelty, in humanity or nonsense.